Search

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games are graphical virtual environments in which gamers interact with each other through avatars many hours a day on a daily basis. The most widely accept...

In recent decades, time-use diaries have emerged as useful tools for recording information on the amount of time that people devote to various activities. Debate remains, however, about whether there are significant differences between the results given by diaries and the results given by questionnaires regarding the share of unpaid labour in the household, in particular the differences between men and women. This paper is a contribution to that debate and widens the focus to consider another type of survey that contains questions that do not call for the measurement of time devoted to housework and caregiving, but rather explore people’s perceptions of the percentage of total housework that they perform.

Historical changes in the use of time have long attracted researchers’ attention. Less attention has been paid to the changing configuration of time use on different days of the week. This article uses time use data collected by Statistics Canada from 1981 to 2005, and experience sampling data collected in 1985 and 2003 in Ontario (Canada) to examine changes in the allocation of time to paid work, housework, shopping, child care, personal needs, and free time on weekdays and Sundays. It examines further whether changes in the behavioural make-up of Sundays have contributed to what is referred to as ‘Sunday blues’ or emotional discomfort at the doorstep of a new week.

Drawing on quantitative analysis of three data sets — the Worker Registration Scheme, the Labour Force Survey, and the UK2000 Time Use Survey — and through an analysis of gendered use of time, this article provides an investigation of the small but growing phenomenon of male (migrant) domestic workers, and more specifically, of what we term the ‘(migrant) handyman phenomenon’, in the UK. The article provides some preliminary documentation and discussion of the scale, characteristics, and drivers of the supply of and demand for these workers. By handymen we are referring to men doing traditionally ‘masculine’ domestic jobs such as home maintenance and gardening. We explore the gender-differentiated character of household work, including care, the implications for the gendered forms and quality of time experienced by women and men, and the ensuing feasibility of and demand for outsourcing these stereotypically masculine activities. In so doing we acknowledge the potential of current expectations of men to be both breadwinners and hands-on fathers to generate new time pressures for households . We also document the supply of migrant handymen coming from the accession countries of the European Union. By focusing on stereotypically masculinized forms of domestic work the article seeks to make a modest contribution to the literature on globalization, migration and social reproduction, which to date has largely focused on the more prevalent phenomenon of migrants engaged in traditionally female domestic work such as cleaning and caring.

This article addresses the co-existence of rigid punctuality and a rubber-like flexibility in the Japanese conception of time. It examines how the clock and social norms shape the everyday use of time related to railways, work, and appointments in Japan. It demonstrates that multiple discourses of time and the complicated interactions among them create temporal complexity in which the seeming contradiction between rigidity and flexibility is compromised. The data derive from long-term participant-observation research among Japanese in Japan and abroad.

Participants gathered at a conference run under the auspices of the Tutzing Time Ecology Project to explore the issue of temporal diversity. One result was a categorization of the fundamental elements of time that constitute the social timescapes. In everyday life these different times often overlap, merging into each other until they can no longer be distinguished. Historically, as temporal diversity increases so also do the opportunities available for shaping our use of time. It was one of the conclusions of the conference, however, that the full benefit of these opportunities can only be obtained once the function and significance of different varieties of time have been understood and the necessary social conditions have been created in which this benefit can be reaped.

This article explores the effect of telework on the experience, calculation and use of time. Telework is said to offer professional and clerical workers flexible time to synchronize work, domestic and leisure activities. Telework is predicted to produce greater productivity and work satisfaction through autonomous time management. This report of a small-scale research project suggests that teleworkers rarely work flexibly during conventional work times, and work increasingly in the evenings and at weekends. More important is the finding that, isolated from the office and colleagues, they recalculate time in relation to an optimally productive hour. Telework is characterized less by time flexibility than increasing work periods.

This paper investigates to what extent, and how, the use of time differs between men and women in a society and an age-group in which the gender gap in labour force participation is rapidly closing. It is found that the gender differences come about primarily through the division of labour. However, this gendered division of work, which co-exists with a high labour market participation, does not lead to a double workload for women. Different mechanisms that are important in both limiting the total workload and maintaining the gendered division of labour are analysed.